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More Activists Face Down MoveOn.org and ACORN

The ACORN and MoveOn.org comrades weren't just out in force in Greensboro last week, they also took to the streets outside Congressional district offices in other cities where FreedomWorks activists and allies were there to meet them with the truth about their government-run healthcare dreams.

Dan M. of Long Island sent us a link to photos and footage of their encounter outside Sen. Chuck Schumer's district office. Check out more pictures and video here. It's great stuff!

Down south in Fort Myers, about 40 turned out on July 9 to counter-demonstrate against MoveOn outside Sen. Martinez's office. You can read about it and see a video here. Pictures are below.

The Obamacare law passed by Congress was huge, nearly 1,000 pages long. But that was just the start; the law was followed by a flood of new federal regulations. By one calculation, for every one word in the Obamacare legislation, there have been 30 words-worth of regulations issued. This wave of regulation has resulted in ever higher premium costs.

Last Friday Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York signed a new bill seeking to crackdown on citizens offering their homes for short term rental through Airbnb. The law would impose fines of up to $7,500 simply for listing a rental on the popular site for travelers. Why would the state of New York pass this law attacking people seeking to earn some extra money to help afford living in one of the most expensive cities in the country? The answer lies with the hotel companies, one of whose CEOs openly celebrated that his company would be able to raise prices in the wake of this law suppressing his competition.

When the so-called "public option" single-payer healthcare program was scrapped during the legislative "debate" over ObamaCare in 2009, lawmakers working on the bill created the Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan Program as a compromise. The non-profit co-op program is meant to compete with private, for-profit health insurance plans in the individual and small group markets. The 2010 healthcare law provided $3.4 billion in start-up funding to help get the program off the ground.

For decades, the costs of providing health care services have escalated. Congress passed ObamaCare, in part, as a supposed way to control these rising costs. However, the health care market was heavily regulated before ObamaCare. The increased regulations from ObamaCare have not prevented costs from rising, they only work to hamper innovations, which lead to bloated costs.

Despite decades of economic analysis showing that it’s a bad idea, calls to increase the minimum wage continue to be heard from people who think you can mandate prosperity. In the latest, particularly egregious example, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing to raise the minimum wage in his state to $15 an hour, following the disastrous example of Seattle. The twist? He’s only applying the increase to fast food workers, leaving the minimum wage for other industries as is.

Many Americans are eagerly (and nervously) awaiting the King v. Burwell decision, which is expected to come at the end of the month. The court case will determine whether ObamaCare, which looks to be falling apart independently of legal intervention, is illegally providing subsidies to those enrolled in the exchange.

California is now considering scrapping its state-run Exchange and moving over to the federal run health care exchange after spending $900 million in federal grant money on its Covered California ObamaCare exchange and running a deficit of $80 million in just the first four months of this year.

The proposed Obamacare premium rates for 2016 are likely to see many double digit increases from the largest providers. The states with the largest increases, as proposed, are New Mexico (51%), Tennessee (36%), Maryland (30%), and Oregon (25%). The final rates will be lower, but they may very well remain in the double-digits because insurers are seeing their first full year of claims data from ObamaCare’s exchanges, and the pool of insurance consumers on the exchanges are tending to be older and sicker than they were hoping to see.

The 16 states with ObamaCare exchanges have each had access to hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money from the federal government to help establish a successful marketplace. And yet, many are finding themselves struggling with high deficits and low enrollment.